joshtronic

Posted in VPS Showdown

$5 VPS Showdown - March 2019 - DigitalOcean vs. Lightsail vs. Linode vs. Vultr

This post is old news – Get fresh benchmarks at VPS Showdown (daily updates!)

New month, new batch of benchmarks!

An FYI for the folks that send me requests to include different providers, I want you to know that you are heard I'm feeling like I've optimized my workflow enough that adding in a new provider or two soon wouldn't take much additional time, so be on the look out in the coming months for more providers :)

Also, here's my usual disclaimer. The following benchmarks are an average of benchmarks on three server instances, at the $5 price point, for each of the providers. I've chosen data centers nearest the New York area as possible, all running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

This month I've added in bolding of the metrics that are the best, either lowest, for things like time taken, or highest, for things like operations per second. I think it will help with discerning things at a glance.

Overview

DigitalOcean Lightsail Linode Vultr
Location New York 1 Virginia, Zone A Newark, NJ New York (NJ)
RAM 1 GB 1 GB 1 GB 1 GB
CPU 1 Core 1 Core 1 Core 1 Core
SSD 25 GB 40 GB 25 GB 25 GB
Transfer 1 TB 2 TB 1 TB 1 TB

CPU Info

DigitalOcean Lightsail Linode Vultr
CPU MHz 2200.00 2398.71 2499.99 2398.15
Cache Size (KB) 30720.00 30720.00 16384.00 16384.00
BogoMips 2933.00 3200.33 3333.00 3196.00

CPU

DigitalOcean Lightsail Linode Vultr
Events per Second 824.89 863.65 706.25 748.54
Minimum (ms) 1.17 1.05 1.18 1.24
Average (ms) 1.21 1.16 1.44 1.34
Maximum (ms) 1.80 3.87 12.78 7.03

Memory (Read)

DigitalOcean Lightsail Linode Vultr
Ops per Second 3419509.73 824231.64 697902.98 3258869.36
Minimum (ms) 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
Average (ms) 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
Maximum (ms) 0.30 1.41 2.52 8.99

Memory (Write)

DigitalOcean Lightsail Linode Vultr
Ops per Second 3387521.30 824928.49 662037.26 3261505.75
Minimum (ms) 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
Average (ms) 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
Maximum (ms) 0.19 0.36 13.25 4.24

File I/O

DigitalOcean Lightsail Linode Vultr
Reads per Second 1561.10 1210.87 1153.16 1847.46
Writes per Second 1040.70 807.22 768.76 1231.64
Fsyncs per Second 3326.29 2577.36 2454.87 3937.64
Minimum (ms) 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
Average (ms) 0.19 0.22 0.24 0.15
Maximum (ms) 42.58 9.73 22.78 12.94

MySQL

DigitalOcean Lightsail Linode Vultr
Transactions per Second 2867.33 2178.33 1898.00 2533.00
Queries per Second 57346.67 43566.67 37960.00 50660.00
Minimum (ms) 2.02 2.44 2.38 2.37
Average (ms) 3.51 4.61 5.86 4.20
Maximum (ms) 69.09 35.12 33.20 32.15

Speed Test

DigitalOcean Lightsail Linode Vultr
Distance (km) 2435.00 2090.30 2374.01 2395.89
Latency (ms) 47.169 44.544 51.444 47.006
Download (Mbit/s) 1319.01 231.77 265.21 288.73
Upload (Mbit/s) 503.26 270.95 339.71 502.83

Apache Benchmark (against nginx on the servers)

DigitalOcean Lightsail Linode Vultr
Requests per Second 306.19 288.72 299.48 259.32
Time per Request (ms) (mean) 1633.27 1732.31 1674.07 1992.21
Transfer Rate (Kbyte/sec) 256.86 242.20 251.22 217.54

Conclusion

Looking at the raw numbers, Amazon Lightsail has more to offer than the rest in regard to storage and transfer allotments, but DigitalOcean outperformed in nearly every single other category.

Obviously YMMV and you should take your application's system requirements into consideration when making a hosting decision.

While not featured in these benchmarks, it's worth noting that Linode has recently released a dedicated CPU plan. DigitalOcean is also moving more into the managed services space with a managed PostgreSQL database as well.

As always, if these posts have helped you decide on a VPS hosting provider, it'd be greatly appreciated if you signed up using one of my referral links below.

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